


dreaming with her feet

by Catstycam



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Ballet, Comics/Movie Crossover, Dancer Natasha Romanov, Gen, Kid Natasha Romanov, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, POV Natasha Romanov, Take these tags away from me, and tchaikovsky, but also a superhero, for like a hot second, if i spelt that wrong please don't kill me, natasha has the serum, or at least she doesn't age, references to swan lake, which i think is in the comics, why are there so many natasha tags, you can be both
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:20:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24286534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catstycam/pseuds/Catstycam
Summary: in swan lake, the cursed girls' doom is lifted. natasha romanov is not so lucky.dancing is just dreaming with your feet. a cursed girl and ballet, through the years.
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Avengers Team
Comments: 2
Kudos: 43





	dreaming with her feet

The box her first pair of pointe shoes comes in  is a deep, dark red, laced with gold, the manufacturer’s name scrolling across the lid.  Natalia plucks them out, unwraps them from their swathes of white tissue paper, and takes a moment to breathe in the smell. Beside her, Yelena has already laced them up, laughing in a way she hasn’t ever done before.  M adame B watches them, mouth twisted into an expression that a different girl might have mistaken for fondness. Natalia is not that stupid. 

Some are, though, smiling guilelessly and open, still young, still soft. Still dumb. Elena is one of them,  Elena who she can’t remember ever being without, who once snuck out with h er to pick wild strawberries from the mountain plateaus, who cried when they were whipped f or the stains that decorated their lips.

Tatiana kills Elena the next day, both pairs of ballet shoes lying by the mats.  When Elena’s neck snaps, the sound ringing through Natalia’s brai n, her pointe shoes are tossed onto a fire. It smells awful , and she spends the next hour clutching Yelena’s hand  like it’s her lifeline to the real world.

***

When Natalia is twenty, when she is _chernaya_ _vdova_ _,_ all grace and death and glimmering knives, she goes to the Mariinsky Theatre with her mark. Aleksandr Yahontov cares more for her dress than for Siegfried leaping across the stage, for Odette’s grief. She stares spellbound at the ballerina who plays Odette and Odile, two sides of a coin, agony in every line of her arabesque, and barely notices Yahontov’s lewd whisperings as he runs his fingers along the Prussian blue of her figure-hugging dress. 

Later, when he lies dead on his own sumptuous bed, she twirl s around the bedroom, knives flying out around her.  O di le, the black swan, she thinks, and laughs as she climbs out of his window. The tip of her braid is matted with blood.  Natalia twists it into a bun and slips on her crimson pointe shoes, dancing round her apartment with only the stars  for audience. She bows, drunkenly, and slips laughing into bed, shoes stained with the scent of iron. 

In the morning she stands at the barre of the tiny dance studio on the banks of the Fontanka and does plie after plie, battement, _jet_ _é_ _-_ for one shining moment she is weightless, free of all the cares that belong to Natalia Alianovna Romanova. Her toes are bloody, the cost of beauty. She straps them up with white bandages and sits at her kitchen table, leafing through the file that was there when she woke up. Sharpened knives lie next to the shoes that lie bedraggled on the countertop; she makes an absentminded note to see about getting new ones. Then she walks out of the door as Anya Markovitz, flirty and giggly, aspiring student of the Bolshoi, all bright clothes and complex plaits that are perpetually being undone.

Returning,  she sheds Anya like a mask, going into the bathroom and scrubbing the blood out from Anya’s beautifully manicured nails.  They’re black, the polish slightly chipped because Anya had an extra rehearsal and couldn’t paint them. Natalia thinks,  _ black widow, black nails, is this my brand now _ , and laughs until she cries.

The next day there is another folder on her desk and another face to wear. She puts her face  in her hands and counts to ten in three different languages, then gets up and star t s to  make up Katrina  Vasilinda's scarlet lips . 

***

Fifty  years old and sitting with Laura on the veranda, Natasha takes a long drag from the bottle of v odka in her hand. It’s good stuff, and she passes it to Laura with a smile that is just too wide to be genuine. Laura shakes her head ,  says something about trying to cut down. Next to her, Clint laughs, his voice a trifle hoarse, and reaches for the bottle. He takes  a swig then tosses it out into the field, a smash heard somewhere among the  inky darkness.

And Natasha-

In that gesture of Clint’s, that smooth throw, she sees- a hand. Extending, bit by excruciating bit,  two fingers in. Grace in every line of the movement. She thinks  _ second position,  _ remembers  that if you were to pour water on the shoulder it would touch the fingertips, remembers - o  f eet in ballet slippers . 

A hand touches her back and she realizes that she is shaking.  Laura is making soft comforting noises, cooing slightly. She wonders if it’s practice for when the child in her belly becomes someone she can hold . Natasha Romanoff, practice baby. Madame B is rolling in her grave.

Somewhere between fifteen to twenty minutes later Natasha raises her head, pastes a smile onto her face that fools exactly no one, then makes her meaningless excuses, finding herself, minutes later, in the bedroom Laura and Clint keep on insisting is hers. 

Lying on the bed half-unpacked- _ sloppy, Natalia, always be ready to run _ \- is her backpack. It’s an unassuming black, some brand name she couldn’t care less about emblazoned on the side in glaring white letters. She does not care about the pack; the real treasure is what lies inside.

Deep in the folds of fabric are a pair of satin ballet shoes, the soles as yet unbroken. Natasha crunches them up in her hand, then slips them on, fingers caressing the silky ribbons.  She ties them without having to think, then rises, hair streaming out behind her, unbound by the ballerina’s bun. 

Two hours later the shoes are bloody, Natasha weary. When she sinks to the floor a white shawl is knocked off her bed. It sinks down over her, and for  a heartbeat  she is the Dying Swan, she is Pavlova, she is a choreographer’s love song and a lament. 

The shoes are tucked back in her pack, and the next night she takes them out and tosses them into the  darkness .

***

She’s told that she is an Avenger, she is  _ friend, trusted, stable.  _ As if she has ever been worthy of trust. 

Natasha Romanoff is sixty years old and looks twenty-five. In all the span of her stolen years Clint and Laura are the only ones who have trusted her completely and utterly, knowing the blood that drips from her fingertips. Now there are f our  new faces, f our  wild cards. F our people she can’t control.

Steve is naïve, a child faced with truths he doesn’t want to hear. Stark thinks he’s always right, can’t hear any other perspective. Bruce can’t even control himself. Thor has been a prince all his life and the entitlement shows. 

Maybe these things are unfair, maybe they are the worst aspects, maybe she’s harsh and cold and calculating. They are true nonetheless. Natasha watches the ticking time bomb they call a team and wonders how she can be expected to trust them. 

Every week, when her tongue is burning with things she can’t say, when it all becomes too much, she slips away to a studio nestled in a corner of Brooklyn. The walls are painted a soft duck-egg blue, the barre worn with loving hands. Her white leotard is smooth against her skin as she ties the pointe shoes bought from a ballet shop frequented by mothers who dream of ballerina daughters. 

Straightening, she goes through the  warmup , letting her mind lose itself in the movements, lets the most important thing in her life be the depth of her  first plie. 

It goes on and on, until she is doing a series of fouettés, arms raised in a clean arc, and she thinks  _ this is where I want to be.  _ Forever caught in that moment of joy like a fly in amber. But her heels drop, and she leaves the studio, pointe shoes tucked away with her leotard. Her hair streams out behind her in the wind, and Natasha Romanoff tilts her head back and laughs, just once.

Then she  turns on her heel, puts on the Black Widow, and  gets through  another day of meetings and sq u abbles  and paperwork.

***

Papers are slid in front of her, she’s told to sign her life away. A government puppet. But it’s safe . It's what she’s got to do to keep this team that she’s foolishly chosen to love. Over her shoulder,  M ada me B’s ghost watches her signature loop onto the line, watches her sign not for guilt or duty or loyalty, but for desperation. For terror.  Madame B laughs, high and cold and clear, echoing in her head, and Natasha  hear her voice.  _ You will never be more than a puppet. _

That's part of the reason she stopped T’Challa, part of the reason she yelled for them to go, that naive boy and the sliver of her past. Natasha lies on the bare white boards of a safehouse in Ukraine, her cheek pressing against the paint and wonders if she did the _right thing._

Her eyes track across the room and find a pink satin ribbon poking out of the top of her bag.

Twenty minutes later the crotchety old lady in the flat underneath is banging on the ceiling and hollering filthy words  in  Sumy-accented Ukrainian, ob jecting to the noise, the lateness of the hour, and her existence in general. She puts headphones on and doe s an arabesque, foot catching on the kitchen door. 

Outside, the rain hammers on the window. Inside, Natasha Romanoff dances the joy of the cursed girls, free at last, and never, never, stops.

**Author's Note:**

> so! finally, i have finished this godforsaken fic. i hope i characterised natasha right because she is just SO HARD. anyway, this is my natasha.  
> i'm working off some comics canon for natasha's backstory, but the main body is set in the mcu. i finished it as natasha immediately post civil war, because frankly i am still not over vormir and i prefer not to think about it.  
> for all my ballet references: i did ballet for about eight years, but i have forgotten most of it. these ballet movements are just dredged up from my memories of many, many exercises and exams. oh, and google. thank you google.  
> swan lake: it has evil sorcerers, cursed girls, and a black swan (odile, played by the same ballerina as plays the white swan, odette). how could i not make at least some references?  
> the dying swan: a dance choreographed by mikhail fokine for anna pavlova.  
> thank you for reading, anyway- please comment! it really makes my day!
> 
> catstycam xx


End file.
